As everyone is getting on their respective planes and flying back to their respective homelands, it's time to look back on what happened and what the conference means.
The event itself was great fun, as ever. Meeting loads of new people (a big thank-you to the #paddyinvasion for my dishonourary membership) as well as plenty of old friends is always enjoyable - especially when everyone's so excited about what they're working on, what they've discovered and what they're up to the next day. It's an infectious enthusiasm.
Interestingly the sessions and labs content has more of a dual impact. On the one hand it's great to see how new things work, how I could use them, and to realise that I get what they do. The best feeling is taking some new information and being able to make use of it or see how it can be used. That's another reason why talking to everyone else is great - they all have their own perspectives on what they've seen and we can share those views, learning things from each other that we didn't get from the sessions. If you were wondering what the animated discussions and gesticulations were in the 4th Street Starbucks at 7am every morning, now you know.
On the other hand, it makes me realise that OS X is such a huge platform that there are parts I understand very well, and parts that I don't really know at all. My own code spreads a wide path over a timeline between January 1, 1970 and September 2009 (not a typo). For instance, it wasn't until about 2003 that I knew enough NetInfo to be able to write a program to use it (you may wonder why I didn't just use DirectoryServices - well even in 2003 the program was for NeXTSTEP 3 which didn't supply that API). I still have a level of knowledge of Mach APIs far below "grok", and have never known even the smallest thing about HIToolbox.
There are various options for dealing with that. The most time-intensive is to take time to study - I've got a huge collection of papers on the Mach design and implementation, and occasionally find time to pop one off the stack. The least is to ignore the problem - as I have done with HIToolbox, because it offers nothing I can't do with Cocoa. In-between are other strategies such as vicariously channeling the knowledge of Amit Singh or Mark Dalrymple and Aaron Hillegass. I expect that fully understanding Mac OS X is beyond the mental scope of any individual - but it's certainly fun to try :-).
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2 comments:
Haha well now you see there are still things HIToolbox allows you to do that Cocoa doesn't (unless they fixed it in 10.5, but don't believe they did)... you couldn't snap windows to screen edges / other windows using standard (Apple supplied) windows / panels... you had to do your own faux titlebar in order to get the callbacks you need.
I'll bet you really wanted to know that didn't you bud :D
But you're right though of course, who'd learn HIToolbox at this stage in the day (or, like us, even if we saw it grow from an egg).
If you've never read the benefits of HIToolbox, I'd call it recommended reading. In the same way people often recommend Mein Kampf. Carbon UI devs must be way more productive than us Cocoa types, look at all the extra lines of code they produce.
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